Project
RoMEO
“Classical
textual copyright law is designed for on-paper text that is sold for revenue.
The primary protections on which copyright focuses concern protection of the
author and the publisher from theft-of-copies-of-the-text, and only secondarily
with other concerns, such as plagiarism, corruption, or misuse of the text
(other than stealing it or selling it illicitly). In the digital era, and especially for texts from which the author does
not seek sales revenue, the other rights must be very explicitly formulated.
Professor's Oppenheim's is accordingly a very important and timely project that
has my fullest support.” Professor Stevan Harnad
The
RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving) is funded by the Joint
Information Systems Committee for one year (1 August 2002 - 31 July 2003) to
investigate the rights issues surrounding the 'self-archiving' of research in
the UK academic community under the Open
Archive Initiative's Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting.
It
will perform a series of stakeholder surveys to ascertain how 'give-away'
research literature (and metadata) is used, and how it should be protected.
Building on existing schemas and vocabularies (such as Open Digital Rights
Language) a series of rights elements will be developed. A solution for the
protection of the IPR in metadata itself will also be created.
A follow up to the Romeo project has just been completed. This new project is called Partnering on Copyright and aims to contribute to raising awareness of the copyright issues surrounding self archiving. The Partnering on Copyright project has provided an advocacy toolkit for promoting the copyright issues surrounding self archiving and has led to further developments on the SHERPA/RoMEO database.
